Issues booting off a USB thumb drive

[maflynn]

I'm trying to boot off a thumb drive and for the life of me, its not working.

I get to PC settings, select recovery, advanced start up and reboot. I see the USB flash drive's light flickering, but it then just boots back into win8.1

I also tried from a power down condition where I held the volume down button, pressed the power button and released it once I saw the surface logo - same symptom.

I popped the USB drive into my MBP and it boots the installer right up (holding the option key to get the boot manager), so the drive itself is bootable.

I created the drive by downloading the ISO, then using Windows 7 USB DVD Download Tool to create a thumb drive from the ISO.

Any suggestions or insight on what's causing the issue?

The end result is I want windows 10 installation, but I don't want to mess with my main volume, so I shrank that, created another volume that I'll be installing windows 10 onto.

 

[maflynn]

I think the issue is the tool I used. I created a recovery drive on the same USB drive and rebooted the SP3, it booted up on the USB thumb drive.

I'll need to google on a differen way to convert the windows 10 ISO to a thumb drive

 

[Guzzler3]

For some reason, I can't post the steps to create a bootable USB drive. The forum filter kicks it out. But I can attach the instructions

 

[maflynn]

Thanks, let me try it. I'm still having issues with tying to create it

Edit:
Looks like those steps did it for me. Thanks

 

[horseybob]

The Windows 7 USB tool by default creates an NTFS bootable partition, whereas the directions above (which worked!) create a FAT32 bootable partition. Why NTFS won't boot from USB? Notaclue.

 

[Harrie-S]

The Windows 7 USB tool by default creates an NTFS bootable partition, whereas the directions above (which worked!) create a FAT32 bootable partition. Why NTFS won't boot from USB? Notaclue.

FYI
For "older" OS you need a NTFS bootable media but for a UEFI bios it is compulsory to have a FAT32 file system .